Now it’s time to talk about lovely Qatar Navigation and Customs. I seriously sometimes don’t understand how people survive in Qatar when it comes to running a business or even trying to do something nice!

So I traveled to Shanghai a while back so that I could go and get some freebies made, heart shaped heat packs, beachballs, stressballs, etc… I had planned to give them all away as gifts, especially to schools and to underpriveledged people as a forum of charity.

I was told two weeks ago that the delivery arrived. I received the papers but it was in iLoveQatar.net’s name. I Love Qatar is the subsidiary and the master company is H.U.G. I was told I had to pay the total of 1,060 QR for various fees like processing documents, storage, handeling etc… by Qatar Freights. Sure no problemo. Paid. Got a paper. Sent the delivery guy to pick up the stuff from the port.

“No, you can’t have the stuff. Give us a Commercial Registration number, traders license, and authorization letter from I Love Qatar”.
We can’t! ILQ is a subsidiary under H.U.G. we can give you the H.U.G. documents if you want…. No they don’t want that…

So I get two letters, one from Qatar Freight, and one from the company that shipped the items stating that the stuff was intended for H.U.G. and that ILQ was a mistake.

“No, it wont work.”, the little man says,  ”But I do have some solutions… either 1) Give me 700 QR and I’ll finish it off for you 2) Get me the documents or 3) Speak to the mudeer (the boss).”

Wait what? He wants me to bribe him? Is this another fee? Sorry, screw that. So I get all documents changed and scanned over to me from Shanghai. The delivery guy takes it over during Eid.

The same man’s there “Oh there aren’t originals, so there’s a 500 QR charge”. What the hell?! On top of that he wants to charge 700 QR to let the truck in to pick up the goods and a 5% customs charge.

But they’re free stuff! They’re gifts! The letters from the delivery company and the manufacturer states that they’re all gifts and not for sale…

The guy has more solutions, oh how nice, “1) Talk to the mudeer and we wont charge you 2) pay everything off or 3) find someone else to help you”

What’s going on here? After paying all these charges, I’m spending 30% of the total value of the goods! Why aren’t there clear rules? Where are the other managers to sort this out?

Now I like to follow the rules. I don’t want to speak to the mudeer. I know the mudeer, he’s a friend but why should I bother him?.. Even while following the rules, we’re all humans and I hope that there can either be some transparancy or a degree of flexibility. *sighs*

I just wanted to show an example of how people need to just sit back and relax a bit. There’s this new show that’s been playing during Ramadan called “Hearts for Rent”.

“A Qatari soap opera which explores the impact of the high rents on a Qatari family has attracted harsh criticism as viewers saw the series as “unrealistic drama distorting the image of Qatar” by exaggerating the fallout of the crisis on the Qatari citizens.

The Hearts for Rent series, which is being screened by Qatar TV since the beginning of Ramadan, highlighted the woes of modernity on the post-oil family and social systems in Qatar and exposed new flaws in the community through a Qatari family who, under the pressure of the rental crisis, was forced to leave the Doha city for Al Khor coastal town to live in a tent.
The series, produced by Qatar TV, came under heavy fire from different directions.
According to viewers, the problems it sought to tackle were said to have been “hyped and exaggerated”.” GT

It apparantly seems that the producer got some bad attention!

“Sheikh Ahmed Mohamed al-Buainain, a prominent Muslim scholar, criticised the series, saying that it went to unreal extremes in dealing with the impact of the rental crisis on Qatari families.
“Under no circumstances, a Qatari family could accept living with bachelors in one house. I do not deny that renting prices were soaring beyond the residents. But our government is providing every citizen with a plot of land and a loan to build his house,” Sheikh al-Buainain told a congregation during Friday prayer.
“I do not see any use of this series. If a citizen is living in a rented house and does not know how to manage his life affairs, then it is his own mistake and hence his problem. It should not be turned into a public debate and given all of this time of screening,” the scholar added.”

This isn’t a DOCUMENTARY, it’s a Soap Opera! If we wanted to get technical. Yes Qatari’s get land, shall we put up our tents on the land? The loan that Qataris are given is 600,000 QR can you build me a house for 600,000? A Qatari has to be MARRIED to qualify. So if I marry a woman I have to put her somewhere while that house is being built don’t I? Put her with family? Maybe I don’t want to. Maybe I want to live with my life alone. Oh it’s MY fault then? Well we’ve just proved that it’s possible now didn’t we!

“Another viewer saw the drama as “not logically coherent” and focusing only on the gloomy side of modern life in Qatar.”

Are you freaking kidding me? It’s a SHOW. Nobody watches Batman and says “there’s no way that thin flimsy rope could pull him up a 100 storey building. And that rope must be at least 1,000m in his pocket”. It’s TELEVISION. If the show was all happy and super smiley people were running around, is that ok? There has to be darkness for there to be a reason to have light.

They did not even dare to tell their friends and colleagues about the address of their new abode.
Ghassan A., a Palestinian expatriate, who viewed several episodes of the series, said it is full of contradictions and exaggerations.

“A Qatari cannot live in a rented house with bachelors. If we took it as a comic relief, it is okay and can be accepted. But as a serious behaviour, it is unrealistic. How come that a father who owns a shop and three of his four daughters are getting handsome salaries but find it difficult to rent a decent house,” he added.

Wait what? Why not? It’s not against the law to live with a bachelor… Just because it’s not common, doesn’t mean they can’t… And as for your final question Mr. Ghassan, if you were watching the show, you’d know that they are in debt. If I get 1 million riyals a month (yes it’s a real salary I really do get that! /end sarcasm) and I owe 2million riyals a month to debt companies. I’m still making a ‘handsome’ salary but I can’t afford anything!

A Qatari columnist also yesterday slammed the series as “incoherent drama”, saying that it did not reflect the reality of things in the country at all.

“The series is full of mistakes and contradictions. It depicted our society as one whose citizens are suffering and being forced to live in tents set up in desert,” Ahmed Ali said.
“It is sarcastic that the series present the Qatari citizen as if he was a homeless and refugee. I challenge the lead character (Abdul Aziz Jassim, a Qatari actor who played the role of Rashid) to give me evidence showing that there is one Qatari who does not own a suitable house in the country,” Ali added

I can’t believe this guy works for a newspaper and he doesn’t read the news. A few months ago there were stories of some Qataris living in their cars! Before that there were those Qataris REALLY living in tents. I win Ahmed. What’s my prize? You know what, wait a minute… I don’t own a home! My cousins don’t own homes! I got my land though, let’s all go pitch some tents

Read the rest of the article here

I get a lot of very nice emails and messages through ILQ and Mr. Q It makes it worth my while to post and share the Qatari side of things. What’s sad though, is that now and then (on a rare occassion)  I’ll receive comments which are utterly rude. Today I thought I’d share one such message:

“You f***wit – Westerners don’t say hello to Qataris, because Qataris think they are better than everyone else and treat everyone like s***.
WHy the f*** would we want to say hello to a dirty, hand arse wiping, homosexual dress wearing, Saddam style moustached, wife beating towel head?”

Obviously I dismiss these messages and insults are quickly moderated, but I had a thought. Should I be moderating them? I’m an advocate of free speech. Should I allow these posts to be posted? 70% is leaning towards ‘No, delete them!’.

So let me start this off by saying that I worked with a great team. I worked for a subsidiary of QNB. Independent (to an extent), challenging, and did I mention that there were great people to work with?

My issue is probably with the bank itself in ‘essence’. I cannot find fault with most people (note I said most). However since joining, there was always the feeling of confusion, no not from my end, but from QNB itself. Nobody really knew what they were doing completely; I talk about the people I interacted with of course and this post is only meant to highlight my experience.

What made the experience a bit sad was that QNB actually treated staff worse than customers. Now if the level of service given to customers is quite low, you can only imagine what staff get. No special rates, hardly any exceptions, processes are a bit more difficult and you have to pick up your account debit card 4 months after you apply in a leaky toilet under head office. Alright so I made the last one up, but that’s how it feels.

After quitting, I decided to take the professional route and stay a month in order to take care of the work left over and to ensure that the projects (and clients) that I had on my plate were completed and/or handed over professionally; after all, that is the right thing to do. Many Qataris simply leave the next day, but oh no, I had to let morals get in the way. It was a foolish mistake.

I had left to Japan when I had the lovely surprise of seeing that my cards were canceled. Yep, I had a month left, went on leave for a few days only to find that I couldn’t use my cards half way through. After returning to Qatar, I saw that I couldn’t use any of my cards! Calling up customer service was of no help because they simply said they didn’t know what the problem was.

So I waited a bit over a week and then finally decided that I didn’t want to have my money in a hidden account and went off to the main branch to set up a new account. They gave me a few papers to sign, signed them, and left with the card. Not bad, I get a debit card on the spot. The next few days didn’t go on too well since it took a while for it to link up to my online banking. It was a hassle, I had to create a new account and transfer funds, but it was over and done with. The end of the month came and my team gave me a nice lunch to say goodbye. That’s pretty nice.

Last pay and I’m out of there. Nope. No pay. Yep no pay for me. QNB didn’t put me on the pay roll. They told me that they would pay my salary 21 days after I quit. Wait what?! I have a mortgage to pay… I worked for a whole month for what? To get paid two months later? I tried called the AGM since he was a friend but he was on vacation for 3 weeks.

So I send off an email to a person I considered a friend at HR and ask him to please ‘help a brutha out man!’ He was always friendly to me, and in fact, he told me to call on him if I ever needed help. I explained the situation and got an reply “Isn’t this your signature”, with an attachment to an account cancellation form. The form was dated the 19th! They canceled my account BEFORE I signed that form. I was GIVEN that form when I created a new account! Plus canceling my original account is against policy! It should have been converted to a customer account… Guess they follow policy when it suits them.

I explained that to him and he cced in someone saying “please follow up”. Nice…. thanks Qatari bro. You really helped me out there. //end sarcasm. So the guy (who also works in QNB HR) goes an reactivates my old account… no I don’t want my old account reactivated… Just send my salary to the new one… No he can’t do that… So Saturday comes a long and I get a text that my account is 10+k overdrawn. What? Wasn’t my account reactivated so that I could get my salary and now I’m overdrawn?

The geniuses reactivated an empty account which automatically charged me an ‘empty account’ fee, then charged me some sort of interest, and then pulled out the mortgage. To make matters worse, the mortgage statement didn’t even reflect that! What the hell?!

So the office manager sends an email to HR on my behalf asking them to please sort this out. What does she get as a reply? “It’s a customer account now so it’s not our business. Let him go to main branch.”. What the F~~~~~ I don’t even want to waste a badword on them.

So now I have to go BACK to the main branch, get them to waive these fees and sort crap out. How nice of them! Who wants to bet I’ll be speaking to someone who either a) doesn’t care or b) ‘can’t do anything because it’s out of his hands’.

Moral? Sometimes you just can’t be too nice…  *sighs* No regrets from leaving a bank that couldn’t at least show me an inch of compassion. I guess I stayed as long as I did because of a few reasons, the CEO was an interesting person, one of the GM’s was a supporting individual, and I met some amazing staff at the bank. It’s thanks to them that I cannot say that all my time was a waste.

Note: Let there be no misunderstanding. My time in my line of work was great. I learned from my team, I managed to work on fantastic and amazingly huge transactions, and I was able to get a new understanding for the way the banking ‘game’ is played, it’s just that I wish things went a bit easier. We return to that classic sentence which is meant to be words of support but often get considered words of despair “Life’s not easy”.

I just had to post this, shukran coached.

1. Disrespectfully recline your seat:

I’m not a big fan of reclining chairs on planes as it is. Mostly because I don’t want to cramp up the person behind me. I think it’s inconsiderate. If, for some reason (like on a red eye flight) I really need to kick back, I prefer to ask the person behind me if they mind my reclining. I believe the person behind you should have a say in whether or not you recline. (Please take note, douchebag from Texas, who reclined his seat into mine without asking on the way to Frankfurt, and spilled my wine all over my lap).

2. Talk to your screaming child in a volume louder than their scream:

I’m no parent, but even I know that screaming at a kid doesn’t make them shut up. The only thing worse than a screaming kid on a plane is a parent screaming at a screaming kid.

3. Go to the bathroom when the flight attendants are serving:

You know, this is only going to lead to you waiting impatiently in the narrow corridor and them being even more frustrated because they don’t want to move their entire cart to one side of the plane just to let you through. I’m not saying to hold it if you’re in a desperate state during this time, but if you can hold it…well then…yeah. I think you should. Nothing other than urgency should come in between me and my mini bottle of Cabernet.

4. Make everyone wait for you to get your carry-on luggage:

Sure, some people get annoyed with those who are over-eager to get off the plane, who stand for minutes on end when the plane lands. And then there are those who wait, unwilling to get up before the aisle is clear for them to exit the plane.

Try to be in between these two kinds of people. There’s no reason to grab your overhead stuff 15 minutes early; but as a courtesy to others, make sure it’s in your hands before the aisle is clear for you to exit the plane. And with that said, don’t bring carry-on luggage that is too heavy for you to carry. It’s not anyone else’s job to assist you with the lifting of your luggage.

6. Talk to the person next to you if they are asleep, have headphones on, or seem disinterested in you:

Airplanes are not dating sites. We’re not fated to be in each other’s lives just because we were assigned seats next to each other. Period. If we’re both feeling chatty, then fine. There are no rules (yet) saying we’re not allowed to have a conversation. But there are rules of courtesy saying that if I’m obviously not paying attention to you, then you leave me the hell alone.

Avoiding these six annoying airplane habits will make the world a better place. I’m sure of it.

What do these two images have in common? Some of you might be squinting by now and wondering ‘is this a trick question?’ Some of you might not even see the difference! (By the way that photo on the right is not me. I actually resemble the one on the left some mornings though.)

I’m actually somewhat disappointed at the fact that so many people in Qatar seem to thing that Qataris are a strange and mysterious race. Alright I give in, you’re right. Star Wars Attack of the Clones was based on Qataris. We all act the same, wear white, and walk in unison.

On a serious note, I know this might come as a shocker, but we’re all independent. Actually scratch that, I do know some people who act the same but GUESS WHAT? Cliques and groups all over the world exist.

Where’s this spawning from? I hate it when someone has a bad experience in a cue and some Qatari jumps in front and people say “Look at these people”. I hate it when a Qatari speeds down the road and people say “Wow these people have no respect”.

We’re not the borg! Everyone’s different, everyone has their own opinion, everyone has their own dreams and goals. Believe it or not, that rude guy who jumped you in the cue would probably do the same thing to me! The only difference is that I’ve got a big mouth and I know how to articulate my thoughts.

I thought it was funny when someone on a typically negative site (which shall remain un-named) mentioned that Qataris only marry Qataris. Some do, WOW, shocker there, but I know Qataris who’ve married, Brits, Americans, Bahrainis, Germans, French, Spanish, Mexican, and Japanese people.

Believe me, I swear this isn’t some master plan to confuse you, but just like every country in this world, you’ll find ALL sorts.

Alright, I’m off to my weekly Qatari Land Cruiser meet-up. The topic today is how to mess up the economy.

I was so proud of the fact that Qatar has been taking leaps and bounds in terms of creating a nation that was free.

My country. Qatar. It was no longer the American dream, but the Qatari dream. A country where you could see a developing nation become what so many people had sought. Skyscrapers emerging from the sands; An education city that set the benchmark for the region; a King and Queen who wanted nothing but the best for their people.

I love the fact that Qatar is a blank page. It gives us the chance to take use our minds to draw the future we always wanted. I love the fact that my country is trying to create peace around the world. I could say that MY country cared.

When the Doha Media Freedom Centre was created, “wow!”, I thought, “Qatar’s opening minds now!”. How sad it is that the Centre is no more. How could it exist if there are still those that rely on keeping people blind? I don’t know who they are and I don’t know what the full story is, however at the end of the day if we’re to judge others, we open the door to be judged.

Click here to read ‘The Doha Media Freedom Centre is no more”.

Every morning, I wake up and slam the snooze button. This ritual is usually repeated three times before I realize that it’s either time to get out of bed and go to work or hit the snooze button one more time, get 10 more precious minutes and be late.

Getting ready usually takes a few minutes and I hop into my car and give it the 2 minute warm-up before I head out to the mines. I’m usually in a good mood. Yes even with that French program on QBS that I can’t understand and constantly wish was morning drive time rather than nursery faransy (that’s arabic for French) time.

As soon as I get up to the corniche I’m so annoyed at the fact that some people feel that they’re destination is more important than anyone elses, so they take that side road (which is meant for peope who want to go to the corniche and park) to bypass traffic and get to the front.

I guess I can safely assume that they’re just as selfish face to face as they are on the road. Driving is all about etiquette and respect; which also happens to be one of the BASICS of Islam!

I personally believe that the Traffic Authority needs to FORCE people to drive better by shaping the roads and the environment into a giant training school. Don’t you just hate it when a three lane road leads to a two lane roundabout?

A solution for that corniche car-park would be to put a barrier and to charge 1 QR per entrance. There’s MANY advantages to this! I’ll list a few!

1) It reduces congestion
2) It will deter people who want to use that road to get around everyone since they’ll waste more time at the barrier.
3) Will generate income (which can be used to beautify or maintain the corniche)
4) Could encourage public transport

Hopefully the Traffic Authority will take the suggestion on board!

Here’s kind of a sad thought, the thobe is such a great peice of clothing, it’s woven and cut in such a way that it keeps you cool by circulating air and due to it’s material and colour (usually white) it blocks heat from the sun.

As I was thinking about the thobe I started to think about the advantages and disadvantages that it held at a social level. I notice that if I’m wearing a thobe, some people treat me nicer in stores, in other stores they’ll assume I’m rich and bump up the price.  Why is that? That’s discrimination in it’s purist form.

What did get me into thinking though was the reaction that I got during my daily activities. In particular, I noted that when I’m wearing a thobe and in the elevator, expats are less likely to say ‘good morning’ to me than if I’m in a suit (which I also wear). I pointed it out to a Kuwaiti friend of mine (who was wearing a suit) who said that it was just a coincidence (which it might well be!) when a person entered the elevator turned to my friend said Good Morning and ignored me (I was on the other side).

It could be paranoia or a coincidence, it could be that I’m vigilant, but trust me I don’t look menacing and usually smile and always say Salam when entering an area. Don’t be shy of Qataris (or Arabs in general), they may look like gliding ghosts (a friend once said that to me), but we’re more like Men in White

Solution? More expats need to wear the thobe so that the line between Qataris and non-Qataris is blurred. We do after all live in a country which I’m proud to say is becoming more International and globally tolerant (I hope). Oh and for those who are actually thinking of getting a thobe, do it! Qataris will be happy at the fact that expats are adopting their culture and you’ll feel much more comfortable too!

A nicely written article by Blitz

Coins or Candies?